News & Research

Thai Artist Explores Displacement

01/04/2012

From Phunsombatlert’s piece Dwelling in Perennial Dreams

Multimedia artist Bundith Phunsombatlert MFA 10 DM has won a grant from the Harpo Foundation, a Florida-based family
foundation that supports unrecognized visual artists through fellowships and
grants. The foundation, which awards annual grants of up to $10,000 to each
winner, selected the recent graduate of RISD’s Digital + Media department from
hundreds of artists who submitted proposals on a common theme – exploring the
relationship between art and site in a dematerializing world.

Phunsombatlert, a Thai
national who now lives in Brooklyn, will use the funds to support a piece
called T|r|a|n|s|t|r|a|c|k|. Already in
progress, the sound installation explores the refugee experience in the US
through the functions and metaphorical meanings of trains. It is also being
supported by the New York Foundation for the Arts, which submitted the grant
proposal on his behalf.

Phunsombatlert describes
his interactive installations as works that address globalization and invite
diverse audiences to explore new cultural meanings. “Carefully considering the
history of a culture or a place,” he says in his artist’s statement, “I analyze
and synthesize these situations in order to develop artwork that reconsiders
Thai identity.”

Dwelling in Perennial Dreams (detail)

Last spring Location One, a nonprofit
arts center in New York’s Soho neighborhood devoted to digital arts and new
media, featured Phunsombatlert’s interactive installation Dwelling in Perennial Dreams. With unsettling references to both primal
human instincts and the global politics of international adoption, the piece
invites the audience to imagine caring for orphaned babies in Thailand by rocking
three wood cradles – each mounted with two TV monitors that play videos of the
upper half and lower half of a Thai orphan sleeping. Viewers can either rock
the babies back to sleep or wake up a sleeping baby by making noises that are
picked up by sensors. One crying baby can also wake the other babies.

“Waking is a metaphor for
the rough awakening to the reality of life. Sleeping is one of the most
essential things for the . . . development of a baby,” Phunsombatlert says in
his artist’s statement. “While sleeping is a necessary part for babies to grow
physically and mentally, the work aims to have the babies perpetually sleep,
thus preventing them from facing the real world.”